The Wednesday Pop Culture Rant enjoys a brisk stroll in the fall, a carpet of leaves beneath our feet, the smell of a chimenea burning contentedly on someone’s back porch.
So The Rant would be thanking you to stop ruining autumn for us. To begin, the only suitable pun for October is Rocktober. Not Chalktober for your street art fair; not Lowtober for your insane sale prices for a new Chevy; not Mocktober for your heee-larious improv comedy festival, which is not going to be funny but just sad when Marlene breaks down backstage because she mistakenly believed a little, “Yes, and . . .” in her life would help her work through her disastrous marriage to Rich, who had the nerve to bring his twenty-something girlfriend/hot yoga instructor to the show.
No, the proper nomenclature is Rocktober for when 104.5 The Lazr brings a drug-addled metal band to the Shriner’s Auditorium so they can stumble through their hits for dudes with mullets and trucker hats and women wearing three-quarter-sleeve concert T-shirts from the original tour in ’78. That’s it. Now move along and figure out how to make a travesty out of November for your clever wordplay.
The Rant also declares a moratorium on pumpkin spice, which sounds like a euphemism for a Jack-O-Lantern with a phlegm problem: “Excuse me one second while I go hack up some pumpkin spice, if you know what I mean.” Pumpkin spice does not occur in nature. Rather, it is a Frankenscent devised by an unholy alliance between Starbucks, Yankee Candle, and a guy named Joey that briefly worked in a meth lab. Stop trying to put it in my coffee, my charcoal briquettes, my beer, my air freshner, my oatmeal, and my cheesecake.1
And can we leave Halloween to the kids? Every office The Rant visits beginning October 1 looks like a set from a Tim Burton movie. I just want my prescription refilled, not a community theater production of Friday the 13th. If you need to work out some erotic fantasy costume issues, go try a little cosplay at the comic-con and leave The Rant out of it. We have enough stress at the dentist without our hygienist wandering in dressed like Harley Quinn.
So The Rant says make some hot cocoa with tiny marshmallows sans pumpkin spice, curl up by the fire and just relax. We thank you for your autumnal consideration.
